I Love Paris in the (*cough*) Springtime

I WENT looking for the romance of Paris and instead I found its corpse, yellow and bloated from having choked on the automobile exhaust fumes and trampled by the feet of slackjawed tourists. As I stood over it and tried to imagine what it might have looked like when it was alive, long ago when Ella sang and Gene danced in its honor, a Japanese tour group formed behind me and an American teenager snapped its picture on her mobile phone. None of them were entirely sure what it was, but it must have been something famous.

Sure, you'll find clues that it once existed. The boulangeries and pâtisseries with their delicious assortments of baked goods and erratic opening hours. The flowers placed on the graves of Berlioz, Truffaut and Stendhal in the Cimetiére de Montmartre. Even the views of and from the Eiffel Tower are still breathtaking in the evening. But the off-season crowds are exponentially worse than the in-season crowds were during my last visit many, many years ago, and walking anywhere above ground quickly fills your lungs with the thick, pungent vapors of car emissions. Heaven help the tourist in summer, when the real crowds descend and the breezeless heat traps the smog. If the romance of Paris is well and truly dead, however, at least we tried to dance on its grave.

Our jig began late one afternoon at the Ermitage Hotel near the top of Butte Montmartre and the Sacré Coeur. The owner was incredibly friendly and helpful throughout our stay, though she steered us wrong with meal recommendations on the first night as well as sightseeing recommendations. Both the food (pink boiled pork something-or-other swimming in bland lentils for my wife, fatty lamb chops for me) and the name of the restaurant (Les Cloches?) were forgettable, but if you'd like some details if for no other reason than to avoid it, it's the first restaurant you come to after L'Ermitage on the ascent of rue Lamarck. This was apparently the most authentic French food you can find -- so authentic, in fact, that even the French seemed to prefer to go elsewhere. We were the only table in the place for over two hours until it closed at 10pm. And the only reason we stayed that long is because the proprietress did everything except bring the bill after we'd asked for it. She took out the trash, chatted with some pals who'd stopped by and leisurely ate a full dinner, all while I sat there watching and waiting expectantly, wallet in hand. “L'addition, s'il vous plait.” “Je m'en fou.”

We capped the evening with a return stroll around Sacré Coeur, where the steps are teeming with couples, tour groups and amateur musicians, and Place du Tertre, where the street artists and caricaturists congregate to prey on the gullible. From the panoramic vantages along this route, you can see above almost all of Paris. Unfortunately, the window in our hotel was positioned toward the opposite direction, so we had expansive views of the most uninteresting part of the city.

Day two started with a visit to the Arc de Triomphe and then a walk down Champs-Élysées toward Place de la Concorde. We didn't have any particular destination in mind, so once our feet started to ache we opted for an hour-long boat trip with Les Vedettes du Pont-Neuf down the Seine, one of the suggestions of the L'Ermitage owner. For obvious reasons the boat was mostly glass, and under the midday sun we baked like plants in a greenhouse. I might have drifted off to sleep on account of the stifling heat and the incomprehensible monotone mumbling coming from our guide, but two charming children in the seats in front of us kept pressing down the flip-up seats and then letting go, resulting in a loud (and apparently highly entertaining) thwack. But all that riotous fun came to an end when big sister approached little sister from behind, hooked a finger at either side of her mouth and then pulled, suddenly stretching little sister's mouth open like a prize-winning bass. Mummy and Daddy separated those two delightful little scamps after that.

By now we realized that we had only stood in one line all day, which was ruining the Paris statistical average. So we took the Métro to the Eiffel Tower, where we would be able to stand in a total of four lines: one at ground level to buy tickets to the second level, one on the second level to buy tickets to the top level, another to take the elevator to the topmost observation deck, and a final one to come back down, all totaling about two hours' worth of line-standing. What made it all worthwhile was the view from the top at sunset. It was a personal mission of mine to show my wife this same splendid view I'd seen more than a decade ago, when I found myself at the top of the Eiffel Tower at the optimal time almost entirely by chance, and if I'd managed nothing else on this trip to Paris I'd still consider it a resounding success. We celebrated this small victory with a delicious, albeit pricey, curry at the restaurant next door to the mediocre one from the previous evening.

And next there was Versailles. We had lunch in the gardens: cheese, meat slices, baguettes and... gazpacho, which isn't terribly French. Then we bought a 2-Day Paris Museum Pass before going into the château and battling the tour groups. At 30 euros each, the pass is a great deal -- if, that is, you plan on sprinting from museum to museum without stopping to look at anything as you pass through. Strictly in terms of admission prices, I think we just broke even on the combination of Versailles, the Louvre and the Orangerie (I can't imagine cramming in any more museums into two days), but the main benefit of the pass is that it allows you to skip admission lines. I suppose that alone is worth a few extra euros.

Toward dusk we passed through Pigalle, Paris' equivalent of the Reeperbahn, to find La Cloche d'Or, another recommendation (not from the hotel owner) and erstwhile haunt of Mitterrand as well as Moulin Rouge dancers. It was closed. I stood on a traffic island for a while and took photos of the Moulin Rouge, then we settled on an anonymous little Italian place for dinner. For the third night in a row we made an after-dinner loop around Butte Montmartre, this time going as far as the Moulin de la Galette.

On the penultimate day we figured that the weather was going to stay nice no matter what, so we hit the Louvre, something we'd been literally saving for a rainy day. Despite the somewhat stomach-turning popularity of the Mona Lisa, we pushed our way through the hordes of Da Vinci Code fans and caught a glimpse (“Omigod,” gasped one bovine American, “her eyes, like, totally follow you!”), then we turned around to take in Veronese's grand and once controversial The Wedding at Cana. We sauntered through the first floor Denon wing and the second floor Sully and Richielieu wings, mostly paintings, circuitously arriving at my goal: Vermeer's The Lacemaker and The Astronomer. On the way we passed Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin's Painting Monkey, which to me sums up the majority of contemporary art, and Delaroche's haunting La Jeune Martyre.

Leaving there after many hours, we crossed the Tuileries Garden to the smallish Musée de l'Orangerie, best known for its cycle of massive water-lily paintings by Monet called the Nympheas. Across the Seine we eyed the Musée d'Orsay, which houses works by Renoir, Degas, Manet, Van Gogh, and so on, and so on, but our legs just weren't as strong as our intentions. We retreated back to Montmartre and tried La Cloche d'Or for a second time, and we were in luck. The food was greasy but outstanding. I had -- vegetarians, stop reading now -- duck leg with potatoes fried in the oil of the meat, and my wife had grilled salmon with butter-rich mashed potatoes. After we'd stuffed ourselves, for some reason it seemed like a good idea to head all the way back to where we'd been earlier in the day and see it by night. This is the evening that I took photo after photo after photo after photo of the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower from the Pont de la Concorde, after which my wife, had she been any less patient, would have liked to throw my camera into the Seine.


Our final day in Paris was a deliberately quiet one. We walked through the Cimetière de Montmartre, where there were only a dozen living souls, and sought out the graves of Berlioz, Degas, Offenbach, Stendhal, Dumas and others. Then we made our way to the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame, stopping in the archeological crypts there to learn a bit about the excavated history of the city and escape the masses of tourists aboveground. We stood outside the Conciergerie, Paris' oldest prison and home to Marie Antoinette in her final hours, for a full five minutes debating whether or not we should go in, but the admission was outrageous and our legs were again too tired. Back to L'Ermitage and then a great Vietnamese restaurant.

For the past two days I've been meticulously (okay, anal retentively) sorting and geotagging my 200+ photos from the trip using PhotoGPSeditor (sorry, Windows folks, it's Mac only) and Google Earth, and so I'm a bit too Paris-ed out to offer much of a summary other than the one I offered at the beginning of this post. The thing is, I'd been keen to get back to the city for the past couple of years, and perhaps I was a victim of my own over-idealization between visits. Or maybe the suffocating car exhaust starved the portion of my brain that controls patience and cheery optimism.

Some photos of the visit -- taken with my new Pentax K10D, which I'm still figuring out -- are on my Flickr page, but more will be on my Picasa page since Google's being far more generous with free storage than Flickr.